CS:GO Launch Options – What options to use?

Last Updated: February 21, 2018

Other than console commands, CS:GO also has an plethora of Launch options that you can put into use to tweak the game. All steam games have an option that you can use to set launch options to make several changes in the gameplay.

Setting launch options will make the game perform the defined action as soon as it is started. For example you can set a desired height and width that you want CS:GO to start with using the -h and -w launch option.

A Dialog box will open up where you can enter your desired launch options

You can find a large number of CS:GO Launch Options online, but in this article I have covered only the important ones that will come into use for a normal CS:GO player.

CS:GO Launch Options

-console

This launch option will launch console as soon as you enter the game. Not really a useful command but some people like to enter special commands before launching a game, depends on how you are playing. This could be different for a professional player, a developer, or a normal user. The commands that you have to manually type here can also be executed using autoexec.

-high

This will launch your game in high-priority mode. That means the CSGO.exe process will be given higher priority over other programs that you are running. This is recommended to gain higher FPS, but this is not a guarantee. People on reddit and other forums have reported that they gained a little FPS boost by using this.

-tickrate 128

Does this launch option make all the games 128 tick? – no.

This launch option will make all your local servers run at 128 tick.

-threads X

X is the number of threads that you want to allot to the game. I am using i5 4400 at the moment which has 4 cores, I’d like to use all the cores for the game so I will enter -threads 4 as my launch option. This can sometimes improve your game performance or even worsen it, use it accordingly.

X is the value of the refresh rate that your monitor has. This launch option is self explanatory, you shouldn’t set refresh rate higher than what your monitor can handle else you will be greeted with a black screen saying out of range. My monitor has a max refresh rate of 144 so I use -refresh 144 as my launch option.

Screen Resolution Related Options

-full/-fullscreen: This launch option will force the game to run into fullscreen mode. This command will be ignored if you have -windowed as well in the launch options.

-w -h: W means width and H means height here. Even though this can be configured using the in-game settings, some people like to use this as their option. For ex, I would use -w 1024 -h 768 (Kenny’S Resolution)

-noborder: really useful if you are using two monitors. This will remove the borders from the CS:GO Window, so the game won’t minimize and maximize as you switch to the second monitor time by time.

-lv (low Violence) – Removed

This used to be really funny mode, low violence version was specially made for people at Germany. When you shoot the enemy, there won’t be any blood and the guy will literally sit down with hands behind their heads. Sad that they removed this from the game.

+cl_forcepreload 1

Forces the game to preload all the maps. Known to boost the FPS by a little bit, not sure though.

What launch options am I using?

These are the launch options that I am using currently, I will make sure to update this image if I update these at any point.

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